The domain Chess.com was set up in 1995 by Aficionado, a company based in Berkeley, California, to sell Chess Mentor, a chess-tutoring app.

[7] In 2005, Internet entrepreneur Erik Allebest and partner Jarom "Jay" Severson, who met as undergraduate students at Brigham Young University, bought the domain name and assembled a team of software developers to redevelop the site as a chess portal.

[15][16] In May 2018, Chess.com acquired the commercial chess engine Komodo, which held an Elo rating of 3300+, third behind Stockfish and Houdini.

[28] 8 players that advanced from the CGC Knockout competed for a $500,000 total prize fund and Global Champion title in the finals taking place in Toronto, Canada.

[31] The development of Torch is supported by many open-source tools, including pytorch-nnue, Cutechess, and OpenBench.

[38][39] According to David Petty, the event organizer in 2013, ChessKid has made agreements and partnerships with chess associations in schools.

[37] They have a long-term partnership with the NTCA (North Texas Chess Academy) which gives children access to online instructors.

[41][42] According to Dot Esports, the Play Magnus Group was unable to make a "sustainable profit" on anything but Chessable, and the merge left "no other realistic chess competitor" except the free, open-source Lichess.

[43] Chess.com has held the Speed Chess Championship annually since 2016, involving a single-elimination tournament featuring some of the world's best players.

The first edition was held on October 28, 2014 with a total prize fund of $1000, including $500 for first place, and was won by Baadur Jobava.

Other super grandmaster winners include Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Alexander Grischuk, Alireza Firouzja, Wesley So, Ian Nepomniachtchi, and Fabiano Caruana.

[68] In June 2018, Chess.com held a special version of the tournament for which the winner would go on to participate in the Isle of Man International which had a prize fund of £144,000.

They feature titled players taking part in a series of blitz games over a non-stop 3-hour period (5-minute, 3-minute and 1-minute, all with a one-second increment).

[73] There have been 38 deathmatches, participants including the grandmasters Hikaru Nakamura, Dmitry Andreikin, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Lê Quang Liêm, Wesley So, Fabiano Caruana, Judit Polgár and Nigel Short.

[153] PogChamps 3, beginning in February 2021, debuted with a wider range of Internet personalities and celebrities, with new competitors including MrBeast, Neekolul, Myth, Pokimane, actor Rainn Wilson, and rapper Logic.

Coaches include top players like: José Eduardo Martínez Alcántara,[157] Raunak Sadhwani,[158] and Benjamin Bok.